"...certainly fills a need in a growing market of interdisciplinary audiences needing a basic understanding
of natural language semantics and principles of information communication....may be very effective in triggering
their interest and motivating further study in the field."
--Alice G.B. ter Meulen Indiana University, Bloomington
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Web Site, June, 2000
Summary
Students of language in all sub-disciplines of cognitive science, including linguistics, philosophy, psychology,
and artificial intelligence.
This book differs from other introductions to pragmatics in approaching the problems of interpreting language use
in terms of interpersonal modelling of beliefs and intentions. It is intended to make issues involved in language
understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible -- not just specialists
in linguistics or communication theorists -- but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having
a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.
Based on feedback from readers over the past seven years, explanations in every chapter have been improved and
updated in this thoroughly revised version of the original text published in 1989. The most extensive revisions
concern the relevance of technical notions of mutual and normal belief, and the futility of using the notion 'null
context' to describe meaning. In addition, the discussion of implicature now includes an extended explication of
"Grice's Cooperative Principle" which attempts to put it in the context of his theory of meaning and
rationality, and to preclude misinterpretations which it has suffered over the past 20 years. The revised chapter
exploits the notion of normal belief to improve the account of conversational implicature.
Table of Contents
What Is Pragmatics, and Why Do I Need to Know, Anyway?
Indexicals and Anaphora: Contextually Identifiable Indeterminacies of Reference.
Reference and Indeterminacy of Sense.
Non-Truth-Conditional Meaning: Interpreting the Packaging of Propositional Content.
Implicature.
Pragmatics and Syntax.
Conversational Interaction.
Perspective.
